


remember, forget

by emelinelou



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, Din Djarin Needs a Hug, Family Dynamics, Fluff, Found Family, Hurt/Comfort, Internal Conflict, Protective Din Djarin, Slice of Life, adventures in babysitting, also:, and has conflicting Feelings about it, and he suffers through a big long Self Revelation, baby yoda is cute and lovely, basically din is Hard Emotionless cool guy until hes not, big time, din djarin becomes a space dad, identity crisis, lots of bonding, young din djarin (briefly)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-15 07:07:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28559565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emelinelou/pseuds/emelinelou
Summary: Din's hands learn violence easily. He thinks this must make him uniquely unqualified to look after anything soft or green or remotely resembling a child. Yet here they are..Alternatively: Din relearns how to be soft, and the kid is his teacher. It's, not easy.
Relationships: Din Djarin & Grogu | Baby Yoda
Comments: 69
Kudos: 168





	1. the mind, and body, and armor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this started as a one-shot examining how din's hands have to relearn how to be non-violent, and what that would mean for din's image of himself, and then got way out of hand. hand, ha. i got really into the backstory section of din's character and how it shaped him, so if you want more of that pls let me know - it was a fun write and im bored so there can definitely be more where that came from:)

Din’s hands learn violence easily. 

They rescue him when he’s eight, and by the time he’s ten he knows where to strike most alien species to deliver maximum results. He knows how tight to squeeze a neck to cut off airflow. He knows how to dislocate shoulders and rupture spleens and shatter eye sockets. 

This is important information. They make sure he knows this too, and he does. To be a Mandalorian is to be a warrior, and to be a warrior is to be one’s own weapon in battle. Singular and efficient. Aware of what actions to take, and when to take them, and _how_ to take them.

Din thinks he can do this. He watches the pledged Mandalorians fight, sure in their armor, intentional in their violence, and he knows it’s what he wants. The feeling of the helpless kid, hiding under a hatch, dead if not for the actions of someone else, still haunts him. He dreams of smoke and blood, screaming and gunfire, and his stomach burns with shame. He hadn’t been able to do anything; he’d sat, powerless, as his people were slaughtered in front of him. As his parents were slaughtered in front of him. As everyone he'd ever known was slaughtered in front of him. He alone had survived, and it had created something hot and angry in the pit of his stomach.

Whatever the name of this hot and angry thing, it is satisfied by action. They tell him he's a fast learner, and maybe that's why. He memorizes fighting styles and defensive stances and the weight and force of different weapons. He flexes his fingers over triggers and shoots until he stops missing his targets. He stays up late practicing the motions of battle in his room, dodging imaginary blows and then dealing his own.

The Mandalorian who found him in the storage bunker - Rett Tirin, he’d introduced himself as later - is the one who becomes his mentor. When Din’s not in language or history or combat or survival lessons, he's with Tirin. The man’s voice is rough but familiar, and Din still has to correct himself when he finds his thoughts wandering. What does the man look like? Like him? Like his father? Under the armor, what is he?

“It shouldn't matter,” Tirin had told him when he'd asked, when he was still grasping at the complexities of Mandalorian culture, a child ripped from his world and thrown forcefully into one he had never so much as heard of. “The armor is the Mandalorian, as much as the body or the mind. They are three pieces of one whole. My armor is mine as much as my face is.”

“I don't get it,” he'd said. Young. Confused. Naive. “Why's it matter? It's just a face.”

Din had still been learning how to read movements instead of expressions. A small tilt of a blue helmet, and the slightest shift of weight. Disappointment. Or maybe amusement.

“It is the Way, child. If you compromise the face, you compromise the body and the mind and the armor too. You compromise the values, and what it is to be Mandalorian.” Tirin had leaned down, bent all the way to one knee. Din was level with his eyes, or where he assumed his eyes might be. “It is important that you understand this. If we lose our values, we lose ourselves. If we lose ourselves, we lose _manda_.”

Din thinks he understands it now. Or, some of it. He’s ten, and that means he has three years until verd’goten. Three years until he takes the oath, swears himself to the creed. To the Way. He looks down at his hands, shaking slightly from exertion after a long training sequence. He rolls them until they’re knuckles up, and clenches his fists.

He is still too weak. He is still too _human_. He restarts the training sequence, and shifts his weight back on his heels, and throws himself forward with everything he’s got.

.

“You’re strong, kid,” Tirin tells him. They never eat at the same time: Din swallows his lunch quickly as Tirin sits and watches, helmet in place. “But you can’t get too distracted out there.”

Usually, Din spars with other foundlings, his age or older. Unexpectedly, he’d walked into the arena and a droid had been on the other side. Upon hearing him enter, it had turned around. Its eyes were the same red beams he saw in his dreams. His heart had crawled up his throat and stayed there throughout the whole battle, making it hard to breathe, and think, and _fight_.

He’d won, but the droid had gotten a few lucky hits in. Tirin had taken him to the infirmary first. By the time they’d finally headed to the cafeteria, Din had felt shaky all over.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He opens his mouth, but nothing else comes out. His fingers dig into bread and he feels the oddest surge of something awful in his ribcage. 

Tirin’s helmet dips the slightest bit. “It was the droid,” he says more than asks. Din doesn’t respond. “You’re still afraid of them.”

“I’m not.” Din’s skin feels hot, stretched too thin. “That wasn’t it.”

“There is no room for fear on the battlefield. Fear is a sign that the mind is not disciplined, and an undisciplined mind -”

“Compromises the body and the armor.”

A small nod. “Exactly,” he says, something warm in his voice. “If you are afraid of something, then you must push yourself until you are stronger than it. Strength is the deterrent to fear. We learn not to fear what we know we can best.”

Din’s heard this before. From Tirin and his teachers and the elders in their Tribe. It always makes him feel weak, and small, and fragile. He is stronger than the droid; he beat it, so he must be. It’s stupid of him, to still be so afraid of it. Something in him must be wrong, a piece of him malfunctioning. He’ll best that too, best everything until there’s nothing left to be afraid of.

“I know,” is all he says. Tirin nods, and treats him to an afternoon off, and Din listens to him recall tales of old Mandalore, of fallen warriors taking eternal refuge in the stars. Din listens, and watches as the sky darkens, and imagines that he is one of those warriors, powerful enough to live among the stars.

.

The day of his verd’goten arrives quickly. He is thirteen, and his test involves being dropped on the outskirts of a foreign planet, rife with hostile animals, and told to find a way back to Mandalore.

They had called the rite a test of both survival and combat skills; they are correct, if understating its risks and the distinct possibility of death as a result of failure. The planet is cold, a chill that sets quickly in his bones, and covered in thick, dense forests. Din spends the first day finding food and gathering enough kindling to make a fire. He is attacked three times by animals of various sizes; all of them larger than him, and all of them unnecessarily strong. He sustains injuries, but this is to be expected. He spends the second day scouting until he finds a small, largely abandoned outpost. The markings are unfamiliar, a strange circle with various points and edges inside. It doesn’t matter; he gathers supplies, and is ambushed by unfamiliar guards in an unfamiliar armor, and assumes it’s all part of the test.

The next day, he returns to the outpost again. His shoulder has been bleeding sluggishly for several hours now, and he’s steadfastly ignoring a limp in his ankle and a searing pain in his side. He spies the same ship he’d seen earlier, before the guards had shown up and driven him back into the forests. He hops inside; it’s easy enough to boot up, and he knows the coordinates to Mandalore better than he knows his own face.

He punches into hyperspace, and is knocked out of it by three ships bearing that same marking. He shoots them all down, and takes critical damage, and risks another jump that ends successfully. Upon landing, he is taken to the sparring arena and told he is to face off against three recent pledgers: older and stronger and fully armored. He defeats the first one in a hand-to-hand combat round. The second equipped only with a training blaster. The third with a long-distance rifle. Each of the pledgers bows at his victory, and he thinks the ceremony is over when the side arena door opens and four droids, B2 Battlers that shine silver in the sunlight, step out. They extend their arms, blasters aimed at him. This is to the death; he doesn’t remember it, afterwards. His brain reduces to something razor thin, with pinpoint accuracy, focused only on surviving and dismantling the threat. He only blinks out of it when he’s standing above the smoking remains of the droids, chest heaving and body burnt.

“Young foundling,” the facilitator says. Din looks up; Tirin stands behind him, and somehow Din can see pride in the smallest angle of his posture. “Today, you become Mandalorian.”

He takes the oath. He receives his armor. He grabs the helmet and has a moment, one moment, of realization. This is the last his face will be seen. This is the last time that part of him will be known. It is unimportant; that part of him had stopped existing years ago. He pulls the armor over his head. It is heavy, and dark, and smells like metal and coldness. Tirin watches him from across the room; Din tilts his head, and Tirin tilts his back.

This is the Way.

.

The first time Din kills, _really_ kills, it is with his hands. Fastened tight around a neck, knuckles popping, the thing’s breath wheezing as its nails clutch at his wrists, digging into the fabric. He’s been charged with bringing in some general of some warring faction of some strange planet, but no one had told him anything about the personal bodyguard situation. Four of them, huge and hulking and speaking a language he’s unfamiliar with. They attacked, and his body knew what to do next.

The last of them thrashes under his hold, and he doesn’t look at its eyes, focuses instead on the points of his thumbs digging deep into jugular. He risks only one glance, and it chills something inside of him: _helplessness_. He’s seen it before, a child in a mirror. The alien stops fighting; it dies with a gust, and then quiet.

“Good job,” his partner for this job says behind him, panting. It’s Din’s debut into the bounty hunter world, and he feels cold all over. “Those kriffs were massive.” 

Din doesn’t say anything. He lets the other guy grab the general, chaining him by his wrists and walking him to the ship with a blaster pointed at the small of his back. 

Din can’t sleep for three days. He’s back on Mandalore by the second, and Tirin gives him a long look before he nods, patting him on the shoulder. “First mission,” he says. Din nods. First mission.

He stares at his hands well into the night, until his eyes burn, until all he sees is black, not the undisguisable imprint of fingers against throat and a pulse that he felt long after its end.

.

Din turns sixteen. He’s been working odd jobs for three years now; his first ones almost always with another Mandalorian, or another bounty hunter familiar with their Tribe, or someone else watching behind his back. The thing in his stomach has grown in recent years, a hot anger turned to silent rage that he feels pulsing in his veins.

He starts taking solo jobs and no one objects. With no one looking over his shoulder, it’s easier to come undone. He punches walls, and gets into bar fights, and sometimes a stray blast will hit someone other than the target and he’s torn between forced indifference and indescribable guilt and the heady burn of hatred; they had it coming. People die and it’s just the way of the world. If brainless shells of machines can murder a whole settlement, then a lost shot can bounce off a wall and pierce an unintended chest. It’s not Din’s responsibility; if there’s one thing life’s taught him, it’s that survival is a constant, clawing battle towards some unnameable goal. There are those who can fight that battle, and there are those who cannot. It’s not his decision who the universe chooses to kill, by his hands or another’s. It never has been.

Tirin finds him on some wasteworld at the very edge of the galaxy. “Kid,” he says.

“I’m not a kid.”

“You’re acting like one.”

It’s a slap across the face. Din is back in the storage bunker, watching fate deal blows that can’t be taken back. 

“The Tribe’s worried.”

“They shouldn’t be. I’m delivering, aren’t I?”

“You’re unstable.”

“I’m not -”

“You are.”

And maybe he is. Maybe there’s an anger so deep that Din can’t even imagine it, steps at the edges of it and sinks further than he thought possible. It always comes back to him, in the end; he’ll feel fit to explode, a million emotions crystallizing into the one that burns like a hot coal in his stomach, and then he’ll be gripping the edges of his bed and pressing the weight of beskar against his wall and biting his lip until it bleeds and shoving it away somewhere until the next time it explodes. A weakness of the mind is a weakness of the body is a weakness of the armor; Din cannot afford to dwell on the things that tear him apart. This is the only other solution.

“Your missions will all come through me from now on.” Tirin pauses, inclines his head. “We’ll complete them together.”

  
The feeling is quick and easy this time. His hands burn to fight the words with force. “That’s not fair.”

“It is. Don’t argue.”

The taste of copper fills Din’s mouth and he looks away, but lets Tirin take him back to Mandalore, a mass of something undefinable heavy in his chest.

.

True to his word, Tirin drags Din along with him for a few months; they make an effective team, grabbing jobs and executing them near flawlessly. 

Din is terrified of Tirin. Not in a way he’d expect. It’s in a way that crawls in when someone lands a lucky hit, or a pulsar knocks Tirin unconscious, or Din is the only thing standing between an injured Tirin and a vengeful Hutt. Din’s mind short-circuits and his body stalls and his armor is the only thing that holds strong, that and a wiretap instinct to fight when provoked. But the feeling is still unsettling, the sneaking way it debilitates Din when something goes wrong and Tirin’s at the middle of it. 

Tirin laughs at what he must see of it, bleeding out of Din’s frustrated fear as he patches together a particularly nasty shot to his mentor’s shoulder.

“Relax, kid. It’s nothing.”

“You’re bleeding out.”

“If I had ten credits for every time -”

“This isn’t funny.”

Tirin just hums, sounding doubtful as Din’s hands fumble with the bandage; they’ve performed the same action on Din’s own wounds, but trip over themselves now that it’s someone else.

“Look,” Tirin starts, but Din finds himself talking over him, not meaning to, like something fights its way up his throat.

“I don’t wanna watch you die,” he blurts. Looks away, but his mouth keeps trailing. “I know I have no control over it and I shouldn’t let it affect me in combat or, or distract me but. I. My parents.”

There’s a boulder in Din’s ribs, and it squashes whatever words were left. He’s choking on air; on smoke and burnt skin and his mother’s screams. Tirin puts one gloved hand on his shoulder.

“Attachment is natural,” he says. “I don’t want you dying on me either.”

“It’s a weakness,” Din spits back.

Tirin tilts his head, his helmet mirroring Din’s. “Some weaknesses are allowed.”

Din scoffs. It’s a lie, one Din’s seen the consequences of. The second you allow one weakness is the second you succumb to all the others lying in wait; it’s a rule he thought he’d learned from Tirin, but apparently not.

Tirin’s helmet swivels, his chest inflating like he’s about to talk, but they’re cut off by gunfire in the distance. “Come on,” is all Din says, pulling him up and swinging an arm around his waist. 

They don’t talk about it again.

.

If some weaknesses are allowed, Din would be dead by now. He can count all of the ways he’s weak, all of the gaps in his armor he painstakingly revists to seal up as often as he can. He still shutters away from droids. He still feels guilty when he brings in certain assets. He still gets choked by emotion when things go the sort of wrong that can’t be undone, the sort of wrong that Din will revisit in nightmares. 

  
But it feels like a contradiction; he has been raised to be loyal, and he is, will always put his Tribe and his fellow Mandalorians before himself. It is the Way. Is it a weakness, too, to be so attached to them? That a threat to them causes his throat to close and his pulse to quicken? That Din, after all this time, still can’t observe the workings of the universe with a passive eye and the honed responses of a creature that knows only survival, that accepts the consequences associated with living and breathing and dying? 

The Mandalorians don’t teach that emotions, or attachments, are inherently weak. But Din adopts it into his own creed with the same dedication, crafts a personal rule that the others might not understand. It doesn’t matter if they get it or not. He will not grow weak. He will not grow vulnerable. He is loyal to his community and his kin of Mandalore, and it is the closest to weakness he will permit. Even admitting it feels like a taunt, like he’s asking the universe to find the one thing that matters and rip it away again. But he can limit his attachments; and an attachment to his culture, to his people, is one that makes him strong. Without them, he would be nothing. It is the one exception to his rule, as maybe it always has been.

He repeats these musings to the Armorer as he watches her mold pauldrons and helmets and vambraces. She’s a quiet presence, an ear always open to listening. He doesn’t talk about this often, doesn’t talk about _anything_ often, but when he does, it’s only ever with her.

“It is not of Mandalorians, to shield from belonging,” she says. “We belong to each other. It is not a weakness like you speak of.”

“But we belong to Mandalore as a whole. It’s not about the individual.”

“The individual is what makes us Mandalorian.”

“But I - if an individual is injured, and I lose my focus, then I am doing a disservice to the Way. I am letting my emotions compromise my actions.”

“Then do not lose focus.”

She’s always so pragmatic; it makes his cheeks burn red, but she has no way of knowing that. He lets the conversation lapse into silence as he watches her pour liquid beskar into frames, the process almost intimate to oversee, like he’s an intruder peering in at something sacred.

“This is about Tirin,” she says eventually. Din looks down at his hands; he feels like a kid again, imprinting on the nearest adults in some wasted attempt at reviving the parents he’s lost. 

“He has raised you, as the rest of us have too. He is your mentor. It is natural that you have formed an attachment with him.”

“It makes me weaker, during battle,” he admits. He wants to explain more, wants to explain the way the terror seizes his throat, clutches icy hands at his lungs, makes his breath come thin and reedy. Makes him _weak_ , in a way he’s sworn not to be.

“Caring is not a weakness.”

“It can be.” 

He has no way to know if she’s really looking at him, but still, he feels her gaze like a tangible thing between them. “This is your own journey,” she surmises eventually, and he leaves more exhausted than he’d arrived.

.

Tirin pats him on the shoulder months later, after a mission gone particularly well. “I’m proud of you, kid,” is what he says, and it’s like warmth shot straight into his bloodstream. His smile feels huge and unwieldy, breaking across his face, wide enough that surely there’s some indication of it outside his helmet. It’s easier, doing what he does, making these decisions, when Tirin is a guiding hand behind him. Kind. Firm. Honest. Affectionate.

He extends his hand for a fistbump. Din almost doesn’t hesitate in accepting it.

“This is the Way,” Tirin says, almost like a joke. Din feels a laugh sneak out of him.

“This is the Way,” he says in return, and they blast out of the atmosphere, leaving a wake of smoking droids behind them, and the weight in Din’s stomach feels almost relieved as it grows smaller and smaller with each passing day. Maybe he was wrong; maybe this isn’t a weakness after all. They plot a course through the Outer Rim and throw stories at each other in the cockpit and maybe, maybe, this is something Din can allow.

.

He is holding Tirin’s hands when he dies. A blaster shot from behind, and Din only really has time to run and kneel and forget entirely about the firefight happening over his head. Sound dims and his focus shutters inward and Tirin raises one gloved hand in the air. Automatically, Din grabs it, squeezing as tight as he can.

“You’re going to be ok,” he says through numb lips. There is a wet chuckle, and Din squeezes harder, but his hands don’t know this; haven’t learned the art of grabbing hard enough to hold, hard enough to keep from leaving. Tirin makes a last choking noise before his head tips back down, and Din’s scanner reveals what he already knows: _lifeform deceased_.

Rage is hot and all-consuming. He doesn’t remember the parameters of the mission, but he kills everything close enough and daring enough to point a blaster in his direction. 

They fly Tirin’s body home, cremate what’s left of him and scatter his ashes over the plains of sand. They ask if Din wants to keep a piece of his armor; Din declines. Recycle it all, make it into new armor for the foundlings. Wipe away all traces of the man until the only thing left of him is the gaping hole in Din’s chest that he tries desperately to fill with apathy and anger and shame. 

It’s the Armorer who finds him, lays one hand on his knee. “This is the Way,” is all she says, but it’s packed with meaning. Does she understand now? What he’d meant? The infiltrating, all-consuming weakness of it all, laid out in front of them for all to see? Everything he keeps locked under his armor reverted to a pulsing, agonizing hurt, one he’s spent his life trying to never feel again? 

He swallows it down; he takes a breath that shutters on its way in and again on its way out. 

“This is the Way.”

.

He is twenty-four during the Great Purge. He’s off-planet completing a mission and his comm blows up. The bits and pieces of it are enough; he leaves as soon as he can, and flies past the system to see for himself. Even from space, the destruction is clear. 

There is no room for surprise; it’s only a matter of time, before these things get taken. It was inevitable. The universe sees attachment and grows harsher in reaction to it, and it always ends up here, with the smoking remains of the last thing you had to hold onto, cast to pieces beneath your feet.

Tracking down his Tribe is near impossible. He relies on bits of information and sparse frequencies he taps into, but eventually he finds what’s left of them on a rock of a planet called Nevarro. There’s the Armorer, and a few familiar helmets and voices, but the loss is tremendous and palpable. 

She only inclines her head when he arrives, as if she’s been expecting him this whole time. “You saw,” she says more than asks. He nods.

“Then you know what’s left of us.”

“Who was it?”

“The Empire.”

He doesn’t know much of politics, of the greater battles he hears are being waged across the galaxy. He finds he doesn’t need to. The how is never a satisfying explanation; all he can do is pick them back up and find ways to keep going.

“What do you need?”

She stands a bit straighter at that. “The locals can’t know we’re here. No one can.”

“I can get us supplies. See if any of the others are still out there.”

She nods. “We can’t show ourselves, not all of us. Not at once. It'll give our position away.” Here, she puts a hand on his shoulder, the ghost of a familiar feeling. “They saw you arrive, the people of this planet?”

“Yes.”

“Then you will be our eyes. You will be this planet’s Mandalorian.”

He thinks this must be what it means, for all three parts to be one. His mind and his body and his armor, sharing the same identity, maybe for the first time in his whole life. He nods. 

He becomes the Mandalorian.

.

The first few years are difficult. No matter how many missions he accepts, there is always more beskar to be found. There are always more mouths to feed. The Tribe expands underneath the city, a powerful parasite, and at the beginning, he is responsible almost entirely for feeding it. The weight of it prevents him from being distracted, or dwelling on the past, or indulging in the more _human_ side of himself, the side he’s been trying to get rid of since the day he decided he wanted to wear the helmet. 

It is easier, this time around, to fill the role he outfits for himself. Stamping out weakness is no longer a choice he grapples over; it is a necessity of survival. It is the baseline of all of his mission parameters. Command: maximum efficiency.

His hands shoot, and strangle, and stab, and kill; the body executes with near perfection, and the mind remains clear and decisive, and the armor shields his every move. He is a well-oiled machine, reaching synchronicity, and he thinks it must show. People skitter away from him in public. They shoot him wary glances. They avoid contact, unless it is to pick a fight they almost always lose. The universe recognizes his newfound strength and finally, finally, bows underneath it.

There is nothing left to be bested; the Mandalorian is a creature incapable of fear, incapable of weakness. There is no boy in a storage compartment. Not anymore.

.

He joins the Guild and doesn’t trust any part of it. But Greef holds up his end of most bargains and he finds he can respect the umbrella policy of complete discretion, of no-questions-asked, of welcomed anonymity.

This is how he spends a near decade of his life. The time passes, and the body learns, and the hands hone their ability as instruments of vicious action, and when he looks back, there is no telling the years apart. The missions and injuries and deaths blur into one, and his life paints a picture of violence that repeats itself over and over and over.

There is a safety in it. A familiarity that comes from knowing his armor and weapons and skills are often the best in the room. A confidence in the lack of questioning, in the singular action, in the ability to cast aside his doubts in search of maximum efficiency. Every time he delivers more credits, or resources, or the occasional beskar to the Armorer, it is with the solid feeling of approval.

“You make Mandalore proud,” she says. He hears the unspoken _Tirin_ and pushes it away; this is not for the individual, for petty attachments. This is for what’s left of their Tribe, hunted and executed, survivors of his second genocide. He is not the only one this time; he’s going to make sure it stays that way.

.

He cleans blood off of his armor and forces himself not to think about it. Sometimes, when the darkness of the _Crest_ is all he knows for weeks on end, he’ll stand in the refresher and stare in the dented mirror and imagine taking off the helmet; it’s not against the creed, to see himself without his helmet. But his fingers shake. His throat closes. He tries to picture what he looks like, tries to form an image of himself in his head, but all he can ever see is the crisp edge of beskar.

He thinks of Tirin: “My armor is mine as much as my face.”

Tirin got it wrong. Tirin got a lot of things wrong, but somehow this feels like the biggest oversight. The armor is his, much more than his face has ever been. He’s lost ownership of his eyes, his lips, the smallest of dimples he knows he had as a kid, the dark shock of hair his mom would run fingers through after he’d spent a whole day tangling it. It’s not his anymore. It’s not _him_. 

He runs gloved fingers over the T-visor and they feel mechanical, unsure what he expects from the touch. What he gets is smooth metal on fabric, and he swallows the resulting feeling away, somewhere he can’t reach, somewhere that won’t distract him. He thinks: action: isolate emotional response. Action: recalibrate. Command: ignore.

The _Crest_ shutters through hyperspace, and his backlog of bounties swing in their carbonite casings, and he feels the passage of stars in the pull of his stomach, a distant and untouchable unease.

.

No one calls him by name anymore, not since the Purge. Their identities are a liability, more than they ever were before. The foundlings call him the Hunter, and his fellow Mandalorians call him nothing but a nod of their heads, and the Armorer has never called him by name to begin with. Has she ever known his name? Maybe it was never important. Do any of the other Mandalorians know it? Or were the last who did still rotting on Mandalore, corpses burnt into the hillsides?

It hits him, halfway into delivering his latest bounty to Greef and his unmentioned client. None of them know his name anymore, do they? The last traces of it died with Mandalore, the final spoken whisper of it lost in the wind.

He pauses, steps faltering. Most of the foundlings who knew him before he received his helmet have died. As have the pledgers, and the full-fledged Mandalorians, and everyone he came into contact with before his verd’goten. The one most familiar with his face - Tirin - has died years ago now, and none of those who’d seen him pre-helmet had survived the Purge. 

And before that, before Mandalore, his family on Aq Vetina. Dead for decades now. 

No one lives who has seen his face. They’ve all been wiped out, a steady extinction that has driven those who were close enough to touch his cheek or call his name into early graves, into piles of scattered ash. He’s unsure what the feeling is, but it sits in his stomach like a weight, like bile, spreading through his ribcage. What is he, if no one knows anymore? If his name and face have been lost to time and death? If even in his own mind, he refuses to pronounce it, refuses to stare at his eyes in the mirror and reckon with whatever it is he sees?

His fingers feel numb as Greef slides over the credits, his unnamed client watching a few tables down. “You know how it is, Mando,” Greef says, nodding at the hooded figure behind him. The one paying for the poor guy Mando’s still got plastered in carbonite. “Some guys would rather ya didn’t know their names.”

He nods. He wonders what his expression looks like, under the mask; it feels stretched too thin, painful, out of place. 

Greef pats him on the shoulder, too rough and entirely unwelcome. “See? I knew you’d understand. Let’s keep business business, yeah?”

He swallows, and nods, and gives half of his earnings to the Tribe, and when he takes off his helmet to sleep, he buries his face in his pillow and doesn’t feel right again until he pulls it back on in the morning.

.

It is better this way, he tells himself when the feeling grows particularly unmanageable.

It is better, it is better, it is better.

.

He shouldn’t accept the bounty. Not without a bounty puck, or a full chain code. Not when the order comes from some Imp warlord, an old loyalist with a face designed to be punched.

His knuckles pop, fists clenching under the table.

But the man has beskar, with promises of more to come. It’s enough to make his decision for him. He brings the single tab of beskar to the Armorer before leaving. She fashions a pauldron of it, and he catches her gaze lingering after she fastens it to his shoulder.

“It’s for the beskar,” he says.

“I know.” But the weight of it is impossible to ignore: the Imperial insignia that melts away under the heat, but hangs still in the room, a reminder of all they’ve lost, all that’s been taken from them. He grits his teeth. A job is a job. He’ll deliver the asset, and retrieve the reward, and move on to the next assignment, the same way he always has.

This is no different. The Armorer nods as he leaves, and he nods back. This is how it has to be.

.

The universe, it seems, has other plans. 

Din looks down. The asset looks up. It is green. Its ears are too big for its head. Its eyes take up half of its face. It is small. And scared-looking. And helpless.

The feeling in his chest is entirely unwelcome; he has no name for it. Or maybe he did, years ago, but it’s been lost with everything else.

He doesn’t think. He shoots the IG droid; it hits the ground with a metallic bang, and the little green thing flinches back, and Din _doesn’t know what he’s doing_ . He lifts his hand. His fingers flex, instinctive, running through the familiar options: punch, grab, choke, kill. The mind thinks _no_ , firm and surprisingly loud, and the body lands on this instead: one small finger, pointed outwards, just close enough that the thing lifts its own tiny hand like it wants to grab on. He’s not close enough to reach. But still.

Still.

He swallows the feeling down. He reprograms the hover-pram-thing to sync with his vambraces. He marches them back the way he came, ignoring small glances and quiet coos of wary curiosity. He will deliver the bounty. He will bring beskar to the Tribe. He will remain who he is: the Mandalorian, cold, unfeeling, uncompromising.

_An undisciplined mind compromises the body compromises the armor._

Somewhere far in the distance, he thinks he can hear the universe laughing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i plan on updating role reversal next week - im not too keen on what's written as ch2 so far so i might scrap it and start over... whoops. anyway, pls comment so we can chat and let me know if there's anything you want to see from this fic/if you have any ideas of where i should go! lovely 2021 friends:)


	2. a give, and a take

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this got angstier than i intended there at the end... whoops! i might extend this to four chapters instead of three because i have a lot still to say and get through in my brain, but next chapter should see a bit more of din grappling with his identity + his relationship with the kid + his relationship with himself/his body/violence in a way that is more wholesome and less depressing at the end. don't hold me to that though:)

The thing… is not what he’d expected.

The whole way back to the  _ Crest _ , it peeps its little head over the rim of the pram like it hasn’t seen the outside world in a while. Maybe it hasn’t. Din refuses to keep wasting glances either way; he trains his eyes to focus in front of him, even as the thing makes little coos and swivels its head back and forth and back again in his periphery.

The rest of the trip is wholly unpleasant. He considers waging a one-man turf war against the local Jawas, but Kuiil - who he finds himself relying on too much for comfort - convinces him to strike a bargain instead. 

This is how he ends up on the hunt. For an egg.  _ An egg _ . Kuiil looks up at him under thick eyebrows.

“You can leave the child with me.”

Din looks at him, and then over his head at the gathering Jawas, and something in his gut clenches. “It’s alright,” he says. Kuiil makes a noise, something between surprise and curiosity. Din doesn’t like the sound of it; he picks up the asset and pops it into the pram and they’re off.

This is how Din realizes the asset can, well,  _ do things _ . ‘Things’ being lift a fully grown mudhorn into the sky mid-charge, preventing it from making Din a permanent fixture outside of its den and ensuring that the missing parts of the  _ Crest  _ are returned to him.

Din swallows down the feeling creeping up his throat; he stumbles through the mud until he’s at the pram, staring down at the thing. Its eyes are closed, little mouth ajar, and Din feels the sudden instinct to press the back of a gloved hand against its head. 

He sees an unwelcome flash of his mom doing the same to his child-self, cool knuckles against forehead:  _ ah, you’re bound to fall sick if you run around in the cold! _

His hand aborts the motion midway, hovering awkwardly above the asset. It will be ok, surely. It seemed to know what it was doing. Right? Besides, why should Din care? The Imp was clear: he could deliver this thing in any condition and he’d be paid. It shouldn’t matter if it’s a little. Overexerted. From possibly using magic?

Din shakes his head; his body aches, the kind of pain he knows will stain his skin for weeks, and he’s too exhausted to make much sense of whatever just happened. He goes back into the den, delivers the obnoxiously furry egg, and only after the sun has long set and Kuiil is steering them back to his camp does Din find the words escaping, unbidden.

“The asset saved me.”

He doesn’t know why he says it; he shouldn’t trust Kuiil. He  _ doesn’t  _ trust Kuiil. But the words slip out anyway, traitorous in their sudden need to be spoken, and Kuiil spares him a glance over his shoulder.

“The child?”

Din swallows, and nods.

“I don’t understand. Saved you from the mudhorn?”

Din explains, and Kuiil listens. Din watches the back of his head as he nods occasionally, almost in time with the bumps of the cart.

“Then you are in for quite the journey, I’m sure.”

Din sits up straighter, even as his back groans at the movement. He can’t stop himself this time; he glances down, but the kid - the  _ asset _ \- is still asleep. “What do you mean?”

“I mean there is more to this story, I feel, than meets the eye.”

“No, there’s not,” Din says, because it’s  _ true _ . “It’s a simple delivery. I’ll bring it back, and that’ll be the end of it.”

Kuiil hums, but says nothing. He takes over repairs despite Din’s protests, making quick work of the damage, and again, Din finds himself breaking from tradition, unsure why as he makes an offer to Kuiil. It’s true; he could use someone like Kuiil on his crew, looking after the ship while he’s off completing missions. It’s only logical. But Kuiil declines, and he’s not altogether surprised. Maybe even a bit relieved. Din shouldn’t have asked. Din shouldn’t have gone after that egg, or saved the asset, or taken this kriffing job in the first place.

He leaves the planet behind, but he can’t shake the feeling lingering under his skin.

.

He checks on the asset. More than strictly necessary. But it’s mission compliant, to keep tabs on the state of the bounty, so he writes it off as standard procedure. A look over his shoulder. No changes. Back to steering. Another look over his shoulder. Still asleep. Back to steering. 

He grits his teeth as he goes to check again; he’s being irrational. His body betrays his mind with aborted motions he doesn’t mean to keep repeating: it’s a distraction, and it’s pointless, and he’s long been trained out of such mindless behavior. 

When he finds himself angling to check on the pram again, he turns the motion into an excuse to stand up and head to the refresher instead, closing the door behind him like that’ll keep the strange, static energy out. He avoids looking in the mirror, even though his helmet is safely in place. Here, under the protection of beskar, away from the lingering presence in the cockpit, it’s like he can breathe again. He grips the edges of the sink and tries to calm the fraying trail of thoughts in his mind. This is no different than any other mission; no different. He will deliver the bounty. He will gather the beskar. He will make Mandalore proud. 

_ The mind, the body, the armor.  _ Breathe in, breathe out.

There is no space for whatever this is, strange moral dilemmas lost in deep space. But even as he returns to the cockpit, his eyes instinctively track to where the asset is still resting, little hands clutching at blanket.

Ignore.

Until, as they begin - no, as  _ he  _ begins - the final approach to Nevarro, he hears the smallest of stirrings behind him. In a ship that normally houses him alone, and the occasional rattling of carbonite-frozen bounties, the noise is wholly unfamiliar and distinctly out of place. A coo, high and cautious, and then a soft gurgling. Din does  _ not  _ look backwards. He stares out of the cockpit, feels his shoulders go rigid at the small thump of a body hitting the floor.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the thing waddle up. His comm flashes and he plays an incoming message from Greef - the standard “good job, safe passage” but with a stray comment about the Imp possibly wanting to eat the asset or hang it on his wall, which makes Din’s grip tighten against his will - as the asset reaches up and pops off the metal ball of his accelerator bearing.

They compete for his attention, a mess of things he didn’t ask for warring for acknowledgement in his head: Greef’s irrelevant comment, the asset’s big wary eyes, the sucking pop of the metal ball into its mouth. It forms a disjointed picture, traces of thoughts that fizzle out with empty ends. 

Frustrated, he takes the ball back. “It’s not a toy,” he says. Cold. Unfeeling.  _ Mandalorian _ . But he feels a lump of something unsettling in his stomach as he grabs the thing by the back of its little smock - holding it like that for a moment, just to look - and puts it back in its pram.

It coos, and this time, there’s no helping the slight angling of his head, the look backwards. It is still watching him, but its ears are downcast, face half shielded by the edge of its pram. Something about this feels wrong.

He turns back around; he’s above whatever this is. He is the Mandalorian, and he will stick to his plan.

.

He doesn’t stick to his plan.

The Armorer offers him the chance at a signet, a mudhorn of all things. He feels like someone’s poured lead in his veins, feels stiff and cold and wrong.

“It wasn’t a noble kill,” Din finds himself saying, staring at the beskar between them. “I was helped by an enemy.”

He knows her well enough now to read the smallest tilts of her head, the simple dip of a helmet. There is something of disbelief in her movements. “Why would an enemy help you in battle?”

He sees: swiveling ears, one small hand outstretched, the asset staring at him, making noises like crying as it was led away by the Imp scientist. He sees: the thing swallowing a frog whole, stumbling around in the bare bones of the  _ Crest _ , looking at him for a moment without the cautious tilt of its ears, with nothing but an open curiosity.

“It didn’t know it was my enemy.”

The silence feels heavy, and Din doesn’t look up. He takes the whistling birds, and the new fabs from Greef, and is powering up the  _ Crest  _ when he hesitates. The metal ball isn’t on the accelerator bearing. His fingers twitch. He sits back in his chair. His hands flex over his thighs, and he stares at his knees, and a feeling unnamed grows in his chest until he can no longer ignore it.

He doesn’t stick to his plan.

.

Greef of all people tries to stop him; Greef and a small army of other hunters. One hand clutches the kid, the other hovers over his blaster.

“The kid’s coming with me.” This is what he says, and he means it. 

.

For a while, it’s touch and go. It’s deciding to leave the kid -  _ kid _ , his head echoes, not asset, and it’s not a big change, if only he could convince himself of that - on some backwater planet called Sorgan, and then realizing he wouldn’t be safe there either. It’s battling some misplaced AT-ST and losing brain cells on Tatooine and being back-stabbed  _ again _ before he finally decides to lay low for a while.

Laying low is somehow the scariest part. It’s easy to tell himself nothing’s changed when he’s out running missions or dismantling droids, but it’s harder when it’s this: him, and the kid, and the  _ Crest _ , and nothing else.

Currently, the kid is staring at him from his - its? - his designated seat. Well. Not a designated seat, just the seat the kid sits in most often. There is no designated kid seat. This is a bounty hunter’s ship and he is a bounty hunter first and foremost, not some space babysitter.

But the kid is watching him; he can tell from the way the back of his head burns with the weight of a gaze he’s still unfamiliar with, and he doesn’t know what to do about it. His only reassurance is his helmet, his armor that facilitates distance even in this weird close-quarter surveillance the kid’s got going. He takes a breath in through his nose, smells filtered air and metal. The armor protects the body protects the mind; three as one. It’s fine.

The kid makes a noise and Din turns around too quickly. They stare at each other. Din turns back around. The kid makes another noise, this one a bit gurglier. Is that a bad sign? Din should check, just in case; he does, and the kid is still staring.

“Are you hungry?” he asks.

The kid’s ears tilt back the slightest bit; Din has a long history of reading body-language, but he’s still growing used to ears and eyes instead of cold beskar helmets. 

“Are you tired?”

Another coo, louder.

“What?”

The kid almost sounds impatient as he shimmies to the edge of the seat, drops down off of it - Din flinches - and shuffles up to Din. His pulse quickens, pointlessly; there’s no threat here. This is a kid. There’s nothing to be nervous about.

Except, maybe there is. The kid reaches out two tiny hands and Din blinks. “You have your own seat.”

The kid blinks back, eyes somehow seeming bigger and rounder than usual, little mouth opening with an insistent cooing noise as his hands paddle in the air. Din feels  _ horribly  _ out of place.

“I don’t - this isn’t a discussion. You have your seat, I have my seat.” He uses one hand and points, as if that’ll help, one finger at the kid’s seat, one finger at his own. “See? Your area. My area.”

The kid is quiet, listening with intent before cooing again and waving his hands more insistently. Din glances over his shoulder, as if somehow someone will see him. It’s stupid. This whole thing is stupid. His fingers curl, and he looks down at his hands, at the bare bones of them that have ripped flesh and burnt bones and waged wars. His fingers uncurl. He looks at the kid, who is quiet now.

Don’t think about it.

He reaches out, tentative now in the silence of the  _ Crest _ , as the eyes of the galaxy pass them by, peering in from outside the cockpit window. He thinks: command unknown. He thinks: pressure exerted: minimum. Grip strength: minimum. Damage inflicted: inapplicable. He watches his hands, not the kid, as gloved fingers wrap around a tiny body. He feels warmth through the fabric of his palm. It’s not that he hasn’t held the kid before, it’s more that he’s never  _ thought  _ about it. Is he squeezing too tightly? Is he hurting the kid? Is he doing it wrong?

He’s distracted by a gurgle, one that sounds unquestionably happy. Little hands come down to rest on his wrists, patting slightly, the vibration of it slipping under the armor like an unfurling weed.

He doesn’t know how long they stay like that: Din, sitting, holding the kid out a full arm’s distance away as the kid watches him and titters excitedly, a trace of an expression in those big eyes like he knows something Din doesn’t. The hands are frozen in place, registering the weight of carrying something carefully and intentionally, something that isn’t a weapon, something that is young, and fragile, and terribly small.

“Ok,” Din says. “Ok.”

He bends his elbows slowly, retracting until the kid is at his side. He refuses to look down, just props the kid up on his thigh and lets go as quickly as he can. It takes the rest of the day to get used to the weight of another body so close to his; it’s unsettling, and unnerving, and uncomfortably similar to a weakness. The thought makes Din tempted to deposit the kid back on his separate seat, where he belongs. But when he looks down, those big eyes are closed and the softest, breathiest snores are filtering in the space between them. The  _ Crest _ is unfamiliar with housing such noises. So is Din. But moving the kid now, while he’s sleeping, feels vaguely unacceptable. There is a feeling, one Din chooses to sweep under the metaphorical rug. He’ll let it slide, but only this once.

.

This is how it starts. 

.

Din finds himself storing information that is not entirely necessary. Or at least, not standard mission information. If he were to divide up the sections of his brain, he considers it would look largely like this: a section on weapons and combat and survival techniques, a section on planetary stats and Hutt domains and current mission parameters, and a section full of useless information such as memories or emotions that he keeps bolted shut.

Somewhere along the way, there’s a dusting off in the corner and a room added without his permission. This is where he keeps,  _ whatever  _ it is that he’s learning.

That the kid has a sweet tooth.

That eight or more hours of sleep is optimal for children, if maybe not alien ones.

That ears tilted up means happiness, and ears tilted down means sadness or upset or fear.

That metal balls should only be chewed on when Din is in close proximity. 

That if he makes his hand move into a ball and sticks out just his pointer finger, the kid will wrap the smallest grip around the appendage and just, leave it there. 

Strange.

And yet. Din is steering them down through Kebal’s atmosphere and he’s got the kid propped up on his knee - only because he knows from long trial and error that if he ignores the kid’s ankle taps, they’re not going anywhere, so really, it’s only the practical solution - and the hand moves on its own. The left handles steering alone, and the right drops down. He extends just his thumb, and the kid latches onto it, and so they descend, connected by a thread of contact that does something quiet and subtle to the edges of Din’s chest; something quiet, and subtle, and easy to write off as nothing.

.

It’s not the only thing the hands do, careful ministrations that fail to gain required permission from the mind before execution. Sometimes, the hands pick up the kid when it’s entirely unnecessary, as if testing their own competence in carrying out this new action. Grab the kid around the waist. Tuck against chest. Wait until kid makes noise indicating pleasure. Command: success. 

Sometimes, the hands sharpen to a point and gesture decisively in the air, usually accompanied with some variation of Din saying “no” or “don’t touch that” or “that’s not food.” He’s not sure where he’s picked this action up from, and an old memory churns out the figure of a woman - his mom? - using the same slight jerk of a finger to indicate that he did something wrong.

Sometimes, the hands just hover anxiously over the kid; after he jumps too enthusiastically off of his chair, or loses his footing when Din has to outmaneuver some block-headed pirates, or does something else that could risk potential injury. The hands reach instinctively and pause, not sure what to do next, and the kid normally just sits and watches with an almost patient tilt of the head.

He tries not to think about it, but occasionally, when the kid’s asleep in the pram and Din’s tipped with the base of beskar against the cool surface of the pilot’s seat, his thoughts circle back to the pit of something he thinks he’s been trying to avoid: something that is maybe too honest to look at head on.

So he skirts the edges of it, and this is what it tells him: that if he looks at this objectively, it could be the telltale signs of a weakness, growing quietly and dangerously in the body. The mind remains firm, committed, dedicated to the Way, to the dismissal of connections, or vulnerabilities, or things that threaten his efficiency as the Mandalorian. He does a quick status check, and comes away certain that he hasn’t let things slip, not there at least.

But the body, the body treads on a fine line, on the tripwire of a mistake. The body shows a disturbing proclivity for actions that do not further the mission, a newfound adoption of movements and touches that echo in a way reminiscent of attachment. Of his knuckles brushing against Tirin’s. Of his father pressing a shaking palm to his cheek. Of his fingers interlaced with his mother’s.

No; this isn’t that. He’s long since eradicated the part of him that could fall prey to such a simple weakness. No, the body remains strong. This is only a side-effect of the strange mission he’s taken on, not a symptom of a growing blind spot. The armor is unyielding, and the mind is strong, and the body is not allowed to falter; is  not  faltering to begin with.

This is only a natural development. The kid is a mission, a debt repaid for his own life saved. He sees a boy in a room, loading and unloading guns, practicing death blows on stuffed dummies. The body knows no weakness; it hasn’t in years.

.

And yet.

He spends an inordinate amount of time clearing out one of his storage compartments further in the hull of the ship, down the hall from the cockpit. Even more time teaching his fingers to string together a makeshift hammock from some leftover fabric he finds lying around in the back, and then tying it up so it hangs and swings with the gentle rocking of the ship.

“Look,” he says. The kid, it seems, has been looking for quite some time, perched up on an ammunition crate and tracking Din with wide eyes. He makes a cooing noise; they’ve gotten louder lately, less guarded. It must be that he’s been able to feed the kid more consistently lately. That should explain it.

Din walks over, grabs the kid from the crate and props him up in the little hammock. The kid makes high, chirping sounds, curious at first and then more excited. 

“I figure. You know. A bed, could be nice.”

The kid hums, and presses his face against the dark cotton. There is a feeling that flutters, warm and unbidden, in the center of Din’s chest. 

“I had stuff lying around. And time on my hands. Might as well.”

The green head lifts back up, and fixes Din with an angled tilt and perked ears. Hands reach out, followed by the now familiar grabbing motion.

“Yeah, ok, lunch time.”

He heats up some leftovers from their last stop, and doesn’t eat in front of the kid, but sits and watches. There is a flash of something familiar, of this situation from another point of view; a kid with dark hair and a chip on his shoulder, and a Mandalorian who slid food across the table and was content to eat later.

He swallows. And heads back to the cockpit. And deliberately thinks of anything but the knot slowly tightening in his stomach.

.

He sleeps in the pilot’s seat, with his helmet on, as he has since the kid arrived.

He puts the kid in his hammock.

Less than an hour later, the kid is back in the cockpit. Din’s stomach drops. There are lines he won’t cross, pieces of his armor he won’t take off. Moves that forgo the line, decisions that he knows are too prone to breeding weakness like a sick, festering disease.

He picks the kid back up, and puts him back in his hammock, and goes back to the cockpit, and does this four more times until it finally sticks. He doesn’t sleep; he stares at the stars, and the yawning pit of it grows and grows and grows.

.

The kid waddles up first thing in the morning. There is a routine to it now; Din hears him coming, the  _ Crest _ echoing slightly with the smallest patter of feet on the floor. He swivels in his chair, and the kid is there, one small hand rubbing sleepily at his eyes. Din’s chest does a weird thing; he needs to get the onboard pressurizer looked at, could be an atmospheric issue.

He pushes himself out of his chair, bends halfway down to scoop up the kid in one easy motion. Tiny hands ping against his armor.

“You ate the last of the stew yesterday, kid,” he says. “We’ve got panna cake and ration bars. Your pick.”

“Eh?”

He grabs the ration bar.

Gurgle, trailing down at the end.

He grabs the panna cake.

Another gurgle, trailing up a bit.

“You eat a lot,” he says off-handedly as they head back to the cockpit. The kid just hums, and Din props him up on his knee and half watches him eat just to make sure they don’t have another choking incident - not something he wants to revisit. 

The kid finishes breakfast, and stumbles around the ship for a bit, and Din only gets up and checks on him every once in a while, until he ends back up in the cockpit with small curling fingers. Din picks him up again, and for a while they pass the time playing the kid’s favorite game of ‘let me see how far I can push my luck.’

He hovers his hand over the cargo release button. Din watches in his peripheral, then extends his pointed-finger of correction. 

“Not that one,” he says. “We don’t touch that one.”

The kid looks at him. He does this too often for Din’s liking, just staring, tracking his movements. Din doesn’t know how to feel about it. He’s not used to being,  _ observed _ , by much of anything other than enemies that only watch to determine nonexistent weak spots.

Without looking away, the kid’s tiny hand moves a bit to the right, over the signal relay button. “Not that one either.”

To the left. “No.”

Up a bit. “No.”

Up a bit more, over the emergency eject button. “Definitely not.”

The kid makes a cooing noise, one that rises at the end, a little  _ ah  _ that sounds innocent enough, but one that Din’s put it in the category of noises that mean the kid’s in the mood to cause some sort of trouble. In the safety of the  _ Crest _ , the damage would be minimal, but still. Din isn’t in the mood to be ejected into space.

So he unscrews the metal ball from the accelerator bearing instead; it pops off suspiciously easily, almost as if Din’s resorted to this form of distraction only every day for however long they’ve been up here together. The kid abandons the buttons with marked excitement, and Din’s pretty sure he just got manipulated.

“You could try to find a toy that’s not part of my ship.”

The kid doesn’t seem too interested in that proposition. They waste most of the day like this, until a stray pirate vessel tries to shoot them out of the sky. Din keeps one hand on the kid’s chest as he whips the  _ Crest _ into barrel rolls.

The kid coos loud and excited when he fires his own blaster cannons at the ship, promptly exploding it into bits. So Din lets him press the trigger a few times when the threat has passed, firing stray bolts into space just to see the color of it.

“Don’t press that unless I’m here, ok?”

Blink.

“I mean it. That’s an important button. Only with me. With me. Got it?”

The kid looks away; Din sighs. He sees that becoming an issue in the near future. He tucks the kid into bed some time later and screws back on the sphere of the accelerator bearing and this is his day; it ends like it always does, with Din having to remind himself again and again that this is normal, mission compliant, necessary behavior. Nothing more. Nothing else.

.

Hunters find them on Helska while they’re making a quick refuel. They speak in a howling language he’s never heard before, but their gestures are clear: they’re here for the kid.

What follows is mostly a blur, pieces of hyper-aware moments sticking out of the grey: the heat of his blaster handle, the slide of his vibroblade through flesh, fingers that break bone with brutal efficiency. 

Later, much later, his hands are still shaking. He’d had the kid in his pram, which is good, because something like bile sits in the back of his throat, and something like fire still burns, terrifyingly hot, behind his eyes. He squeezes the steering so hard that his knuckles pop, and only when they’re in deep space does he dare to pry them away. 

He looks down; his fingers tremble. It’s a nauseating thing that follows, a horrible truth that’s been splintering in the back of his head, chasing away sleep, spilling like oil in his mind. These are the same hands he’s always known. But the idea of them holding the kid, or carefully dividing food shares, or pointing out wrongs and rights, is laughable.

Beneath him, the kid dares the smallest tap of his leg. Din stares forward; he is a weapon, and to think he’d almost forgotten.

.

For a few weeks, he is able to keep up this pretense. To rebuild walls he hadn’t realized had begun to crumble. Maybe the body  _ had  _ become compromised after all; maybe he had put it all at risk, unbeknownst to even himself. He reexamines his actions. He identifies the gaps. He runs a tighter ship. It’s the only response to the festering thing in his chest. Shut it down, and restart, but without the errors that had led him astray before.

But, there are consequences. When the kid presses against his shin, there is no bending down to pick him up. There is no sitting in laps, no automatic holding, no stray moments of a finger out for the sole purpose of being held. 

The kid gets wilty. Din realizes for the first time how far the kid had come - how loud, and open, his expressions and noises were - only as he begins to slide backwards, as he gets quieter, and smaller, and less present. The excited coos are reserved only for snack time. The insistent taps of his ankle disappear entirely. The late night stumbles out of the hammock and into the cockpit where Din is slowly stop happening altogether.

There are a million things that Din thinks, a million things that scatter past the whirring space of his own mind; he grabs at stray thoughts when he’s alone, but they only serve to fuel his confusion. The kid is unhappy, and it sits like a weight on Din’s shoulders. The  _ Crest  _ sounds almost back to normal, but feels immeasurably colder than before. The hands still try to reach down for the kid, when his mind slips in its attentive ordering of things.

And still, despite the iron grip he has over everything else, there is this, a trap like tar he’s walked himself right into: repeats of the scuffle on Helska, bounty hunters finding them on the edges of the galaxy, uncountable threats that catch them both unawares, and Din finally risks putting a name to the ugly stone that drops in his stomach whenever he catches them with blasters pointed at the kid.

Behind his eyes, he sees Tirin, bleeding out in his arms. His parents, blown to bits above him. Mandalore, a smoldering wasteland. 

It’s fear, and it’s not something he’s felt in a long time. He can ignore it most of the time, but when the threat directs itself away from him, when he looks back to see eyes wide and ears unhappy and even a  _ mention  _ of violence aimed at the kid, it’s like a match thrown on an ocean of gasoline. A flood, well out of his control, only tapering off when he can guarantee that the kid is safe again.

It’s an exhausting turnaround, a dump of heedy adrenaline and a need to protect so strong it hurts, and then Din having to take it all and stuff it somewhere where it won’t keep cracking and fissuring, somewhere where it won’t grow to be the same weakness that’s cut him off at the knees too many times before. He knows where this particular path leads, has seen the burning ruins of it before. Not this time.

.

Greef calls him with a plan; Din doesn’t trust him, or the plan, but it seems like the only way to get the hunters off of the kid’s back. Still. He rounds up Kuiil and Cara, both of which he trusts minutely more. 

It’s relieving, to pick action. To stop thinking, and overthinking, and running his mind in circles over steadily growing cracks he feels in his bones and chooses endlessly to ignore.

_ If we lose our values, we lose ourselves. If we lose ourselves, we lose manda _ . Din knows where he puts stock: in strength, and action, and a conquering of fear. He knows better than to lose sight of that.

Whatever plan Greef has dissolves quickly enough, and everything is thrown up in the air. Din’s blood runs like mercury; he makes the call to send the kid back. There’s a feeling in the back of his throat, an instinct that hums like survival: things are going to get volatile, and Din doesn’t want the kid anywhere near that.

But the universe has other plans: the Imp warlord, the same one as before, is shot in front of them, alongside his entire battalion of troopers. The deal goes sour, and finally the curtains rise for the great reveal. That it is Moff Gideon at the root of it. That it is Moff Gideon, the Moff Gideon he thought dead, the Moff Gideon responsible for the Great Purge, who plays a trump card Din thought was long off the table.

“Din Djarin” he says, and the name is ice down his back, is an anvil on his chest, is a whisper of something that’s been unspoken for decades now. Cara shoots a look his way. So does Greef. There isn’t time to react; there is a feeling like boiling, terrible, destructive, tearing its way upwards, and he has no choice but to grab it by the neck and shove it back down, somewhere it can slumber until it inevitably sneaks out again in the dead of night.

This is not all. The kid is back, and he is with the IG droid, and Din takes a blow to the head, and the world is thrown into a tinted grey. He hears himself say it, over and over: “take the kid.” It’s all he can think of; it’s all that matters. Cara nods, and the rattle of death sinks daggers into his bones, and he is sure this is where he finally stops cheating the inevitable. But in the burning remains of the building, the IG droid’s proposition sounds logical enough. He doesn’t have it in him to stop it, anyway. A metal hand descends towards his face, and he chokes on blood.

The helmet tips; smoke rushes to meet his face, and he could be anywhere. A boy in a storage compartment as his world burned. A Mandalorian under a firefight as his mentor sucked in a final breath. A lost remnant of a planet coated in ash and destruction. 

But there is bacta spraying against the back of his head, and he grabs the creature again, the coil of a feeling dark and slippery, and thinks  _ later _ .

This is how he is able to see the full irony of it, the slap in the face the universe has been winding its hand back for since Din had the gall to think there was something tangible that he mattered to, something tangible that he was alive for, if only as the Mandalorian.

It is a pile of helmets, stacked in a sewer. It is the closest he’s ever come to a home. A culture. A purpose. A belonging. The armor is discarded like waste, and this is what it really is: a joke laid raw and bare, hanging on the punchline that Din keeps falling for the same trap, for the same illusion - that there are things that last, and certain key attachments that you can keep, and purposes that don’t falter - over and over and over.

The Armorer is the only one left. Din’s legs quake at seeing her, and he does his best not to let it show. She speaks of the kid -  _ the kid _ , who is watching, and Din’s chest  _ aches _ to hold him - and Jedi sorcerers and gives Din the kindest thing she can: new mission guidelines, despite it all. A seed of purpose, in the wake of a disaster he knows he alone is responsible for.

As they leave, there is the quickest touch of a hand on his shoulder. He turns, and looks at her helmet, more familiar than his own.

He remembers, years ago, the way she’d nodded at his poorly explained conflict, said: “This is your own journey.” There is an echo of it here, in her grip on his arm.

“It is not over yet.”

Din swallows; it is not over yet.

The rest of it plays out somewhere over his head; his mind shrinks in on itself and his body reverts to what it still knows best, shielded always by the armor. There is no burning rage this time, only a horrible, tasteless resignation as he crashes Moff Gideon's ship into the unforgiving grey of Nevarro.

Later, much later, he is back. On the  _ Crest _ . With the kid. His eyes blur. His head pounds. There is no space in his ribs for pretendings, or falsehoods, or the quiet sort of lies that protect from the truth; there is a hole, right next to the others, and he hates that it’s all he sees.

He’s been left behind before, been the maker of his own undoing. He will brave it, alone, as always.

But.

There is a tap against his shin. He looks down. The kid looks up. Din sees the shadow of a child from years ago; a child who got lost, and stayed lost. Who got lost and played at being found until he ran out of lies.

He blinks. The kid looks tired. Small. But he winds one tiny hand under the armor of Din’s shin, palm flat against his exposed pant leg, and there is a sudden sense of calm, of acknowledgment, of something cool and soft soothing the burnt edges of the mess in his head.

It makes no sense; but then again, when has it ever. Din reaches down and picks up the kid and it’s a dare against the universe, an act of defiance flung right at its face. Din shudders.

The kid is quiet, that knowing look in his eyes as he presses two small hands against the armor covering Din’s chest. Din is past compromises; he bends his head until the edge of faultless beskar rests softly against the space between the kid’s ears.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and it means a million things and yet, really, only one. “I won’t. I won’t let that happen to you.”

He feels more than hears the kid’s hum.

“The Jedi. Your family. We’ll find them. I’ll.”

But it’s all he can manage; the kid taps on his armor again, and maybe there’s a meaning hidden there too, but Din’s too tired to find it. It is exhaustion that carries him off, and the weight of something solid and familiar, despite it all, tucked against his chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pls pls pls let me know what you think - my lifeblood is your commentary/criticism and seeing as school is about to start up for me again, imma need a LOT of lifeblood to get through this:)
> 
> (role reversal should be updated next monday! if school knocks me off schedule, blame the Establishment, not lil ole me)


End file.
